On par

Recently, China has wanted to demonstrate that it has caught up with the West. The Olympic Games and the Expo were elaborately staged to wow the world, and Chinese astronauts - taikonauts – were sent into space for the same reason.

China has expanded its subsurface fleet and is currently building the biggest high-speed railway network in the world. "It's not like it was five years ago," says Jin Canrong from Beijing's People's University.

"China and the US are now on par," he added. "Before, the US would make its demands and China would answer like a schoolchild wanting to please the teacher. China played a very passive role."

Increasingly bold

Those days are over, he says, especially when it comes to territorial matters. Beijing is becoming more and more vocal about its demands concerning Tibet and Taiwan, which it sees as a "renegade province."

"I think that now China is feeling stronger, they would like to be able to stop the Americans from selling weapons to Taiwan," agrees David Zweig, a political scientist at the University of Hong Kong.

Meanwhile, the US is "concerned about the growing Chinese military and want to keep monitoring this, while the Chinese see this as an intrusion into their national space," says Zweig.

Chinese officials made their displeasure with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton very clear when she pledged to support the Philippines in the South China Sea territorial dispute. They said this was a regional matter and the US had no right to interfere.

Despite China’s increasingly bold attitude, Jin Canrong does not think that China is on its way to becoming a global military power. "It describes itself as a great regional power in East Asia, which has a certain influence on the world but still has not reached national unity. Taiwan is still on the agenda."

Lack of trust

There is one vital element missing in the Sino-US relationshp, says David Zweig: "Little things maybe would be easier to manage if there was a lot of trust - think of Europe and the United States, there are problems but there's a fundamental trust - but there is no fundamental trust between the US and China."

"Therefore, things like promises at Copenhagen that aren't followed, selling weapons to Taiwan, meeting with the Dalai Lama, trade issues, a difficult business environment now for American companies in China, all reinforce each side's view that the other is really not trustworthy and has views to dominate."

Looking optimistically to the future, Professor Jin says that there is trust in certain matters: "China knows that its newly-acquired power also means responsibility. It is ready for this and in many areas it is already working with the US - humanitarian aid after natural disasters, epidemic control, the fight against terrorists and pirates. Its responsibility will probably grow in future."

And this is a fact that worries some observers, who think that China is ruthlessly pursuing its own interests, especially in Africa, where it wants to secure raw materials and agricultural land. Whereas Western nations often link development aid to demands for reform, China comes as a business partner, trading oil for weapons, or copper for a new road.

However, David Zweig thinks Beijing's main priority will remain the stability of China: "They don't have very much international experience. There's almost nobody in the top ranks – only about 3 or 4 percent of the members of the Central Committee have actually lived abroad for any extended period of time. Maybe they just don't know the world as well as we thought they did."

Author: Frank Hollmann / act
Editor: Marina Joarder